Many of these bugs could expose private user info, much like recent Apple iPhone bug

Android
may be open source, but that doesn't make the popular smartphone
operating system invincible to security problems. Hot on the
heels of a recently
discovered iOS 4.1 vulnerability that could give malicious users
access to a locked iPhone's phone app, messaging app, and more, a
plethora of Android vulnerabilities have been identified.

The
new Android vulnerabilities were discovered by researchers at
security firm Coverity. In their Coverity
Scan Open Source Integrity Report the researchers scoured 61
million lines of open source code, including the Android OS source
used in the popular HTC Droid Incredible. Code from Apache,
other Linux kernels, PHP, and Samba were among the 291 open source
projects examined and compared to the Android kernel.

The team
identified 359 bugs in the code. Of these, 88 of them (roughly
25 percent) were categorized as "high risk" -- bugs that
could endanger users' privacy.

Coverity gave Android mixed
praise for the quality of its code. It said that Android had a
lower density of bugs per thousand lines of code than average open
source software. But it said it had a higher bug density than
the highly scrutinized Linux kernel and that some of the critical
bugs should have been caught before release.

While every
Android distribution is slightly different, even for the same
operating system number, it is thought that these vulnerabilities
likely appear in most Froyo-equipped Android phones.

Google
has responded quickly to Coverity, reportedly preparing over-the-air
fixes that will be delivered by January at the latest. Coverity
is holding off on releasing details of the vulnerabilities until
those fixes are delivered. Over-the-air fixes are one reason
some security experts say Android's security is superior
to that of the Apple iPhone (iOS does not have over-the-air
OS updates).

Google now has something in common with Microsoft
-- as the market leader in a major OS segment, it is the highest
profile target for exploitation. Google owns nearly
half of the U.S. smartphone market, while RIM and Apple each have
roughly a quarter of the market.

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